living in the past Quotes

″...a note on paper of an archaic shape, in a thin, flowing calligraphy in faded ink, to the effect that she no longer went out at all. The tax notice was also enclosed, without comment...”

“I can’t remember the year we spent on the road, and I think that means I can’t remember the worst of it. But my point is, doesn’t it seem to you that the people who have the hardest time in this—this current era, whatever you want to call it, the world after the Georgia Flu—doesn’t it seem like the people who struggle the most with it are the people who remember the old world clearly?”

“A return to the past, however impossible, was the yearning of many artists and intellectuals.”

“I had agreed with Mother to look to the future, but secretly I dreamed of returning to the past.”

“Lest the awful remembrance should remain and grow, and overshadow mirth and pleasure, and the great haunting memory should spoil all the after-lives of little animals helped out of difficulties, in order that they should be happy and light-hearted as before.”

“So many black families spend all of their time trying to fix the problems of the past. That is the curse of being black and poor, and it is a curse that follows you from generation to generation. My mother calls it ‘the black tax.’ Because the generations who came before you have been pillaged, rather than being free to use your skills and education to move forward, you lose everything just trying to bring everyone behind you back up to zero.”

“The only one who had not lost for a single minute the awareness that [Rebeca] was alive and rotting in her wormhole was the implacable and aging Amaranta. […]Always, at every moment, asleep and awake, during the most sublime and most abject moments, Amaranta thought about Rebeca because solitude had made a selection in her memory and had burned the dimming piles of nostalgic waste that life had accumulated in her heart, and had purified, magnified, and eternalized the others, the most bitter ones.”

“You know most people live ninety per cent in the past, seven per cent in the present, and that only leaves them three per cent for the future.”

“Our past history with loved ones shapes our present relationships. In moments of disconnection when we cannot safely engage with our lover, we naturally turn to the way of coping that we adopted as a child, the way of coping that allowed us to hold on to our parent, at least in some minimal way.”

“It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,”

“We will never know peace if we lose the present because we are trapped in the past and paralyzed by the future.”

“Your perception is all f****d up. All you can talk about is trash that’s already happened. You can’t base your life on the past or the present. You have to tell me about your future.”

“You kill your future by mourning the past”

“It’s the Centennial Celebration,” Grandma said. “We’re all going back to the old days and the old ways for a week.” “Grandma,” I said, “you never gave up any of the old ways.”

“I can imagine that if my life had taken a certain turn, there would be the Barclays Bank, and there I would be, both of us in ashes. Do you every try to understand why people like me cannot get over the past?”